Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Indeed, the scene with Hallie takes place in 1972 at the Vermont compound that Charity and Sid have maintained as a summer gathering place for their large extended family, including Larry and Sally as honorary members. Stegner's powerful but unassuming narrative traces the bond that develops between the Langs and the Morgans from their first meeting in 1937 through their eventual separation on the occasion of Charity's death from cancer.

She's the dominating personality, domineering in some respect, but still wonderfully, when you think of what she actually does for people. I found all the name-dropping in Florence a bit tedious even if I did appreciate some of the analysis particularly of Massacio (one of my favoritea there) as well as the playing of Beethoven's 9th over the chilling conflict over dishwashing. Once you start to pair off, however, and your previously single-and-carefree friends do likewise, you wake up one morning to realize that all your friends are couple-friends. It is one of the great secrets kept between couples…The hunt for love is always on, and in some tragic, truthful, stunning way it forever eludes us.Sid, the wealthy scion, turned out to be the most conflicted – a would-be poet and dreamer sometimes at odds with Charity’s agenda and will.

The books that I really cherish over a long period of time are the ones somehow explore how to live a good life, I think. la amistad) Es una relación que no tiene una forma establecida, no hay lazos ni obligaciones, como en el matrimonio o la familia, y no son la ley, ni la propiedad, ni la sangre quienes sostienen la unión; no hay en ella más adhesivo que el aprecio mutuo. Charity is one of those highly competent people who likes to organize herself and everyone around her, particularly, in her case, her husband Sid, an English professor. Nevertheless “There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters. In doing so, he has created a believable human drama the dimensions of which reach out beyond the story's end and resonate in the reader's heart.Both families have children and their ups and downs and health issues – one woman spends time in a mental institution; the other gets polio – she’s in an iron lung for a while and for the rest of her life has crutches and eventually metal braces on her legs.

I go out the spongy woods path past the woodshed and into the road, and there I meet the sky, faintly brightening in the east, and the morning star as steady as a lamp. Not only a book of a lifetime, Crossing to Safety is a book that comes at the end of a long lifetime of writing. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.You come to me and say, “I’m going away to a cabin in the woods by myself for a few days, to escape the noise of 21st century life. In between, Sid and Charity’s first time together at her family retreat in northern Vermont, Battell Pond, is like a stroll through the first garden. Neither couple’s struggle improves linearly or follows classical plot structures; rather, they weave through and strengthen their core narrative threads, modeling the rhythm and synthesis of real life. Sid spends his life trying to get tenure writing articles that he doesn’t care about, but it’s all because of Charity. Con una exquisita sencillez, ambos autores consiguen conferir a unas vidas sin especial atractivo ese encanto extraordinario que las convierte en el objeto de un relato conmovedor e inolvidable.